Brazzil

It is possible that Brazil may win a sad new title in 2010: the first country in the world to license the commercial planting of a new variety of genetically-modified rice, Bayer's LL62. If CTNBio (National Technical Commission on Biosecurity) approves the proposal at a meeting later this month, the rice will be the 20th genetically-modified product grown commercially in the country.

The supporters of president Lula in Brazil constantly remind us that he is very appreciated by foreign journalists. Well, I bring some bad news to these people: Lula is definitively not as "loved" as he once was.

Readers ask me if I'm not going to comment on the infamous Decree 7,037 establishing the National Human Rights Program, the last gasp of the Kremlin's widows in a Brazil where the essence of the air is still red. (Le fond de l'air est rouge, as the 1968 rich kids used to say  in Paris).

Barack Obama assumed the presidency twelve months ago amidst "strained hemispheric relations." Productive cooperation on a variety of shared regional concerns had been all but ignored by a Bush administration completely distracted by the Iraqi War and in favor of an approach characterized by confrontation, diplomatic bullying, and the continued pursuit of policies detrimental to the interests of both Latin America and the United States.

Accessing the Internet is becoming as much a routine as brushing your teeth first thing in the morning. While we sleep the world keeps happening and if it happens it must be a record of it in a news portal or some blog.

After a promising beginning that included, among other accomplishments, being the second country in the Americas to achieve independence and the first and only to do so after a slave revolt, Haiti's prospects soured so precipitously that by the end of the millennium it was being dubbed the failed state of the Western Hemisphere.

Startled, no one was. Not even shocked. For long the unique political vocabulary of President Lula exceeds the minimum standards of the vernacular. We will not repeat past nouns and adjectives pronounced by His Excellency during his ad libs, let's just take a look at his latest one. For him, the president of the PSDB (Party of the Brazilian Social Democracy), Sérgio Guerra, is a "babaca" (asshole).

When African Americans talk about traveling to Brazil, two types of tourism tend to be discussed. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in so-called "heritage tourism" to Salvador da Bahia, supposedly Brazil's blackest city. On the other, there's the "scandal" of what author Jewel Woods has called black America's best kept secret: black male sexual tourism in Rio de Janeiro.

It's been flooding in São Paulo, off and on, for well over a month now. Just when you think it couldn't rain anymore, another storm moves in and pounds the city tropical styles. The southeast regions of São Paulo are the worst affected with hundreds of people losing their possessions in ground-level homes and apartments. It wreaks absolute havoc in traffic, especially downtown, where streets flood off and alternate routes get jammed.

Should the United States be concerned about Iran's determined efforts to reach out to Latin America? Or, as was suggestively described in the Economist, by the Ayatollahs' strategy of cozying up to Latin America?

Whenever you deal with foreigners - for business or pleasure - it is wise to match your tone to their cultures and habits. There are countless anecdotes of people who lost deals because they offered alcohol to an observant Muslim or couldn't negotiate with a Japanese for lack of understanding what "yes" and "maybe" really mean in their world - "maybe" and "probably no", respectively.

Even an earthquake has its good side, fancied the presidential palace's strategists the day Haiti ended. Since 2004 leading the UN peace force, wounded by the death of Zilda Arns, a diplomat and 17 soldiers, Brazil managed to get with the tragedy the trump card it needed to take, free of competitors, the leadership of the international operations to revive the country in tatters.

The prospect of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 followed by the Olympic Games in 2016 has reignited the debate about public security in Brazil, a country where there is an undeclared war taking place in the favelas between the military police, paramilitary groups, and drug traffickers, but where the principal victims are the poor.

The world leaders have confirmed the prisoner's dilemma; unfortunately the entire world will face punishment. Faced with what scientists fear would be climate changes that threaten life on earth, world leaders met in Copenhagen to reach an agreement to limit carbon emissions. The meeting was a failure, mutual mistrust and the supremacy of self-interest over collective benefit undermined any potential to cooperate.

Were it not for this kind of collective abduction that we are all subjected to with "The Man" doing as he pleases over the institutions - and the public morality - the case of the Rafale fighter jets would be treated for what it is: a scandal, perhaps Lula administration's largest one. It is not like that because I want to. That's the way it is.

The pearl of the Antilles - I mean, Haiti - boasts of being the first Latin American country to declare itself independent. United under the leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture and, later, of former slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines, blacks and mulattos fought the French troops until the proclamation of independence in 1804.

Two days before Christmas, when bells were already ringing, President Lula heard a distant clatter in his office. They weren't good old Santa's reindeers. It was the metallic sound of the horses' hooves of his Defense minister and Armed Forces chiefs on their way to trap the president in the most serious military crisis in the Republic since 1977.

As soon as the danger dissipated, Nelson Jobim, Brazil's Defense Minister, showed up at the war zone ready come hell or high water. In case of a tsunami, he would land on a beach in Haiti in the admiral uniform he was given in Russia. In case of a space invasion, he would fly over the Caribbean with the gala attire of a French Brigadier. As this was an earthquake, the Defense minister channeled general Jobim and burst in Port-au-Prince wearing a campaign uniform.

I left Recife in 1970 and lived outside Brazil until 1979. When I found the political conditions auspicious for my return, I chose Brasília. At that time, residents of Brasília did not vote for any offices.

On the last day of 2009, amid the New Year's congratulations, a serious fact provoked an avalanche of thoughts on the Brazilian elite's false morality and its values in their various levels. However, instead of concealing, it revealed the depth of the Brazilian social apartheid and prejudice that maintains it.